John Merriam was part of the crew for the S.S. Producer when she put in to Bandar Abbas in early 1972, the first U.S-flag ship to visit that godforsaken port. The Shah of Iran was still in power and tension was in the air. Unannounced, and seemingly from nowhere, a man named Mike Costello walked out of the desert. He came aboard the Producer casually as if he were part of the crew, pushing a handtruck stacked with cases of soda--a welcome sight in that parched region of the Persian Gulf. John wouldn't know until later, when he unwittingly became Mike's mule, that Mike was a professional smuggler and that hidden between the cases of soda on the handtruck were 40 kilograms of Afghani hashish. John also wouldn't know until later that Mike's original mule was one of the Ordinary Seamen on the ship, a man who later would be murdered for reasons that had nothing to do with smuggling.